1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to food preparation machines and more particularly to machines which mass produce pastas and the like.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Gnocchi is an Italian delicacy made from potato dough. While gnocchi can have a variety of shapes, it most commonly takes the form of an elongated, thickened half-shell having a scalloped exterior. The gnocchi can be served plain or with a sauce.
While a number of prior art patents disclose devices that are designed to produce flour based foodstuffs such as noodles, ravioli, and the like, there is no known machine designed to produce gnocchi. Most machines designed to produce flour based products cannot be used to produce potato based products because potato dough is stickier, less malleable, more tender, and thicker than flour dough.
A typical machine for preparing flour based noodles is described in U.S. Pat. No. 1,730,932 of Glisce and includes a dough hopper, a ram for forcing the dough down a tube, a knife for cutting the dough into cube shaped pellets which fall onto a ramp, and a roller for shaping the pellets into spiral shaped noodles. Other machines, such as that described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,068,570 of Lanoie provide plugs of solidified egg by hydraulically extruding the processed eggs from an apertured cylinder and then slicing the eggs with rotary cutter blades.
The above cited devices and other devices of a similar nature would not function well with a potato based dough because the dough would tend to stick to the transport ramps and to all moving parts of the machine that it came into contact with. Furthermore, since potato dough is not as malleable or cohesive as flour dough it cannot be processed in the same way as flour dough is.